The Ends of Life

It would, of course, be misleading to think of people as having pursued lifelong objectives in some systematic fashion. The French philosopher Pierre Charron, whose works were translated into English in the early seventeenth century, declared that a ‘fundamental point of wisdom’ was ‘the fixing to one’s self of a particular end, and then chalking out some determinate track, or course of life, which may be proper for leading us to that end’. But he went on to observe that ‘the greatest part of mankind’ did nothing of the sort.3 For most people, life was a matter of moving from one short-term expedient to another. For many, the quest for subsistence was so all-absorbing that larger questions about how they should live seldom arose: mere life was a more urgent matter than the quality of life.

Their needs, desires, and aspirations were those which their world allowed them to formulate.

When we speak of human fulfilment today, we usually have in mind two distinct, though closely associated, notions. One is of fulfilment as the full development of people’s distinctive capacities—their musical talent perhaps or their athletic skills. The other is of fulfilment as the gratification of their deepest desires—their wish to be loved, say, or their craving to be famous.

Some philosophers have called the first ‘capacity-fulfilment’ and the second ‘aspiration-fulfilment’.

Weird connection to Gaddis definition of grand strategy

The Greek and Roman philosophers devoted much energy to determining what constituted an objectively desirable life, eudaimonia, as they called it, the flourishing, well-being, and happiness which came from the realization of one’s daimon, or true nature.

This notion was articulated in the Romantic movement of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.10 For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), individual autonomy was a precondition of the moral life,11 while the Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) preached the doctrine of personal authenticity, urging that men should be true only to their own consciences. The French Revolution encouraged, at least among literary intellectuals, a cult of self-expression and a desire for emancipation from the constraints of social convention. In the Napoleonic age, freedom was seen as individualistic self-realization.12 In Germany, the notion of Bildung (self-development) emerged as a guiding principle of education. It was expressed in 1791 by Wilhelm von Humboldt; when he said that ‘the true end of man’ was ‘the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole’.13 This doctrine was appropriated in mid-nineteenth-century Britain by John Stuart Mill, who maintained that ‘the good of the species’ could ‘in no other way be forwarded but by… each taking for his exclusive aim the development of what is best in himself’. He praised ‘experiments of living’, ‘varieties of character’, and ‘the free development of individuality’. Among his contemporaries were the poets Alfred Tennyson, who wrote, ‘I would but ask you to fulfil yourself,’ and Robert Browning, who in one of his poems lamented what he calls a ‘life unfulfilled’.14

Existentialist philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, though, unlike the Romantics, who saw authenticity as a matter of getting in touch with one’s own inner nature, the Existentialists thought of individuals as creating their nature by their own choices.